Portrait of Johnny The Life of John Herndon Mercer

One It is often difficult to remember exactly where and when you met someone, but in the case of Johnny Mercer I remember that first encounter almost to the minute. I had come out to Los Angeles from New York, where I then lived, to write the lyrics for some songs in a movie. I called a friend, the wonderful singer Betty Bennett, and asked if she might be free for dinner that night. She said she would be attending a birthday party, and then added, "Do you want to go with me?" I asked her whose birthday it was and she said it was that of the composer John Williams. I said, "Since today is also my birthday, I'd love to go." We went to the Williams house. As we entered, I saw three men standing at the top of a little stairway from the foyer into the living room. The one on the left was a friend of several years, Henry Mancini. The one on the right I did not recognize, although I soon learned he was Dave Cavanaugh, one of the most important producers at Capitol Records. The one in the middle, the man with a space between his incisors when he smiled, was Johnny Mercer. I knew that face from countless photographs in Down Beat and other publications, including one called The Capitol News, which was distributed free through record stores throughout the United States. And because it was my thirty-eighth birthday, and John Williams's thirty-fifth, I can date this meeting exactly: February 8, 1966, shortly after eight p.m. I had the most immense respect for Johnny Mercer. Every American lyricist I have known considers, or considered, him the best of them all, and the volume of his output of great lyrics, at all levels, from the outright commercial ("Goody Goody") to the reaches of high art ("Once Upon a Summertime," "One for My Baby"), over four decades, is awesome. In 1942 alone he wrote for motion pictures twelve major standard songs that are still performed around the world. In addition to that, he was the man who founded Capitol Records, an upstart company that had a huge impact on Americanand, by extension, worldculture. The company began in 1942, in the midst of World War II, under conditions that would have halted a lesser man, including a major shortage of the shellac on which discs were pressed and a pending musicians' strike. Capitol was a fresh wind in popular music and jazz, and its artistic direction, as I would eventually learn, was set almost completely by Mercer. Even its black label with silver lettering and an outline of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., seemed special. But above all it was the music that came out on Capitol, produced either directly by Mercer or indirectly by his close collaborators. Suddenly we were presented with an array of new artists, most of them of the highest quality, in those middle and latter years of the war: the King Cole Trio, Jo Stafford, Freddie Slack, Stan Kenton, Andy Russell, Bobby Sherwood, Ella Mae Morse, Peggy Lee, and so many more, including Mercer himself. He was a singer of distinctive, rough-hewn, vaguely bucolic insouciance and charm whose humor shone through such of his songs as "The Strip Polka," one of Capitol's first important hits. Mercer's roots were in jazz, and his vocals had a wonderful and unpretentious swing. Later came his recordings of such poignant works as "Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home," which he wrote (with Harold Arlen) for the musical St. Louis Woman. That was another thing about Capitol: a lot of its records were just plain funny, including such Betty Hutton hits as "My Rocking Horse Ran Away." When I was growing up in Canada, you couldn't get those records there: Capitol had no out-of-country distribution during the war. So I used to buy them in NiagaraLees, Gene is the author of 'Portrait of Johnny The Life of John Herndon Mercer' with ISBN 9780375420603 and ISBN 0375420606.